“An eleven-year-old girl stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well.

So – for the category ‘A book about food’ I went for The Wonder by Emma Donoghue.

However, I was struggling for some categories – but a little Google revealed that Popsugar had some recommendations for all of the categories – so I thought that would be a good place to start! Nonetheless, the tension builds with enormous force, and however implausible the resolution, the reader, who has come to care about Anna and her nurse, cannot help rejoicing in the happy ending.I have been doing the Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge for, well, 2017 to date! Sometimes I’ve shoe horned some of my TBR pile into a category – and sometimes I’ve followed up on recommendations from friends. It is hard to believe that the eleven-year-old child Anna, who is steeped in Catholic spirituality and theology, could so easily accept the nurse’s fiction of holy milk that enables change of identity or that a faster whose body has broken down to such an extent could or would so easily swallow food. The denouement is, however, abrupt, overheated, and unconvincing, both medically and devotionally. The characters she draws in great detail are nuanced, convincing, and heartbreaking, as is her picture of the horrors of Catholic piety, with the cover-ups of incest and child abuse it has sometimes produced. Her sketches of class relations, nationalism, and clerical hierarchy convince and disturb. Donoghue gives a picture of the impoverished Irish countryside so graphic that the reader seems to smell the bogs and taste the damp bread. In propulsive prose, Donoghue tells the story of the nurse Lib Wright, hired to watch a fasting child in order to test the claims of family, villagers, and clerics that she lives without food. Although sometimes hailed as miracles, a number of the fasts caused the death of the faster, were given a naturalistic interpretation, or were unmasked as frauds. They received many different interpretations by contemporaries. Such claims of miraculous inedia are found not only from the sixteenth century onward, as Donoghue states in an acknowledgment, but also from the thirteenth century or even earlier.

Informed by research into the Irish potato famine, the role of Florence Nightingale’s nurses in the Crimea, and nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism and folklore, Donoghue’s The Wonder is a historical novel, based on the often sensationalist stories of fasting girls that proliferated in Europe from the later Middle Ages.

The wonder donoghue